Starter for Ten Read online

  And now she's talking about the party last night, how awful it was, and about the terrible men she met, lots of awful, naff, no-neck rugger-buggers. She leans forward from her chair when she talks, long legs coiled around the chair legs beneath her, and touches my forearm to emphasize a point, and looks me in the eye as if daring me to look away, and she also has this trick of tugging on her tiny silver stud earrings while she talks, which is indicative of a subconscious attraction toward me, or a mildly infected piercing. For my own part, I'm trying out some new facial expressions and postures too, one of which involves leaning forward and resting my hand on my chin with my fingers splayed over my mouth, occasionally rubbing my chin sagely. This serves several purposes: (1) it looks as if I'm lost in deep thought, (2) it's sensual—the fingers on the lips, a classic sexual signifier—and (3) it also covers up the worst of the spots, the raised red clusters round the corners of my mouth that make it look as if I've been dribbling soup.

  She orders another cappuccino. Will I have to pay for that too? I wonder. Doesn't matter. The Stephane Grappelli/Django Reinhardt cassette is on a permanent loop in the background, buzzing away like a bluebottle against a window, and I'm pretty happy to just sit and listen. If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway. She doesn't know where I'm from, she doesn't ask about Mum, or my dad, she doesn't know my surname, I'm not entirely convinced that she still doesn't think I'm called Gary. In fact, since we've been here, she's asked me only two questions: “Aren't you hot in that donkey jacket?” and “You do know that's cinnamon, don't you?”

  Suddenly, as if she's read my mind, she says, “I'm sorry, I seem to be doing all the talking. You don't mind do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  And I don't really mind, I just like being here with her, and having other people see me with her. She's talking about this amazing Bulgarian circus troupe that she saw at the Edinburgh Festival, which means it's a good time to drift off and work out the bill. Three cappuccinos at 85p, that's £2.55, plus the chips, sorry, pommes frites, £1.25, which incidentally works out at about 18p per pomme frite, so that's 25 plus 55, that's 80, £3.80, plus a tip for laughing boy over there, 30, no, say 40p, so that's £4.20, and I've got £5.18 in my pocket, so that means 98 pence to last me until I can pick up my grant check on Monday. God, she's beautiful, though. What if she offers to go halvsies? Should I accept? I want her to know that I firmly believe in gender equality, but I don't want her to think I'm poor or, even worse, mean. But even if we do go halvsies, I'll still be down to three quid, and I'll have to ask Josh for Mum's ten pounds back till Monday, and that will mean I'll probably have to be his butler till the Christmas hols, white his cricket pads and toast his crumpets or something. Hang on a second, she's asking me a question.

  “D'you want another cappuccino?”

  NO!

  “No, better not,” I say. “In fact, we'd better get back—have a look at the results. I'll get the bill …” and I look around for the waiter.

  “Here, let me give you some money,” she says, pretending to reach for her purse.

  “No, really, my treat …”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely, absolutely,” I say, and count £4.20 out on to the marble table, and feel pretty ritzy.

  Outside Le Paris Match, I realize it's getting dark; we've been talking for hours, and I had no idea. For a while, I even forgot about The Challenge. But I've remembered now, and it's all I can do not to break into a run. Alice is a stroller though, so we stroll back to the Student Union in the autumn evening light, and she says, “So who put you up to it, then?”

  “What? The Challenge?”

  “Is that what you call it? The Challenge?”

  “Doesn't everyone? Oh, I just thought it would be a laugh,” I lie, nonchalantly. “Also, there's only me and Mum at home, so there weren't enough of us for Ask the Family …” I thought she might pick up on this, but instead she just says, “The girls in my corridor put me up to it, for a dare. And after a couple of pints in the bar at lunch it suddenly seemed like a good idea. And I want to be an actress, or something in TV, a presenter or something, so I thought it might be good experience in front of the camera, but I'm not so sure now. It's not an obvious springboard into the Hollywood firmament, is it? University Challenge. I just hope I get knocked out now, to be honest, so I can forget about the whole silly business.” Tread softly, Alice Harbinson, for you tread upon my dreams.

  “Have you ever thought of acting as a career?” she asks.

  “Who, me? God, no, I'm terrible.…” Then, just as an experiment, I say, “And, besides, I don't think I'm good-looking enough to be an actor.”

  “Oh, that's not true! There are lots of actors who aren't good-looking.…”

  Which serves me right, I suppose.

  As we approach the notice board outside Meeting Room 6, it feels like getting my O-level results all over again: the quiet confidence, mixed with just the appropriate amount of anxiety, the awareness of how important it is to be in control of your face, not to look too pleased with yourself, too cocky. Just smile, nod knowingly, and walk away.

  Approaching the notice board, I can see Lucy Chang's panda peering over her shoulder at the test results, and there's something about the angle of Lucy's head that tells me it's not good news for her. She turns and walks away, and gives a sweet little disappointed smile. Looks like Lucy won't be joining us at Granada studios, then, which is a shame, because she seemed nice. I smile my commiseration at her as she hurries away, and head over to the notice board.

  I look at the notice.

  I blink, and look again.

  UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE AUDITIONS

  The results of the 1985 University Challenge selection heats are as follows:

  Lucy Chang—89%

  Colin Pagett—72%

  Alice Harbinson—53%

  Brian Jackson—51%*

  So this year's team is as follows: Patrick Watts, Lucy, Alice and Colin. Our first rehearsal is next Tuesday. Many congratulations to everyone who took part!

  Patrick Watts

  * (In case of absolute emergency or extreme, life-threatening ill-health, Brian Jackson is our first reserve.)

  “Oh, God! I don't believe it, I'm on the team!” squeals Alice, jumping up and down and squeezing my arm.

  “Hey, well done, you!” I find a smile from somewhere, and nail it to my face.

  “Hey, you realize if you hadn't given me those answers, you'd be on the team instead!” she squeals. Well, yes, Alice, I do realize that, actually.

  “What shall we do now? Shall we go to the bar and get completely pissed?” she asks. But I've run out of money, and I suddenly don't feel like it anymore.

  I haven't made the team, I've got 98p in my pocket, and I'm hopelessly in love.

  Not hopelessly. Uselessly.

  Round Two

  “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy,” said Estella,

  with disdain, before our first game was out.

  —Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  9

  QUESTION: The Invisible Woman, Mr. Fantastic, the Thing and the Human Torch are better known as … ?

  ANSWER: The Fantastic Four.

  There are three things that I always expected to happen at university—one was to lose my virginity, two was to be asked to become a spy, three was that I'd be on University Challenge. The first of these, virginity, went out the window two weeks before I left Southend, thanks to a drunken and begrudging fumble up against a wheely-bin, round the back of Littlewoods, courtesy of Karen Armstrong. There's not a great deal to be said about the experience, really: the earth didn't move, but the wheely-bin did. Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we'd actually “done it properly,” which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique. Walking home on that memorable summer night, as we enjoyed the postcoital dregs
of a bottle of warm cider, Karen kept saying over and over again, “Don't tell anyone, don't tell anyone, don't tell anyone,” as if we'd just done something really, truly awful. Which in a way I suppose we had.

  As for being asked to spy for Her Majesty's Government, well, even leaving aside my ideological reservations, I'm pretty sure that languages are important to a career in spying, and I do only have O-level French. It's a grade A, but still, in terms of actual espionage, this pretty much limits me to infiltrating, say, a French primary school, or maybe, at a push, a boulangerie.

  Red Cobra, it's Dark Swallow here; I have details of the bus timetable.…

  Which just leaves The Challenge, and now I've managed to cock that up too. It's the first meeting tonight, and it's taken all my powers of persuasion to even get invited. Patrick refused to return my calls, and when I did finally catch up with him he said it wasn't really necessary for the reserve to come along, as he was pretty sure that no one was going to get run over. But I kept on and on until he caved, because if I don't come along, then I don't get to see Alice, not unless I start hanging around outside her halls of residence.

  And don't think I haven't thought about it, either. In the six days since we met, I haven't seen her once. And I've been looking. Whenever I visit the library, I find myself doing a circuit of all the desks, or loitering suspiciously in the drama section. When I go to the bar with Marcus and Josh, and am being halfheartedly introduced to some new James or Hugo or Jeremy, I'm watching the door over their shoulder in case she comes in. Just walking between lectures, I'm constantly on the lookout, but there's been no sign of her at all, which suggests that she's having a very different university experience from me. Or maybe she's seeing someone else? Maybe she's already fallen in love with some handsome, cheekboned bastard, a Nicaraguan poet in exile or a sculptor or something, and she's spent the last week in bed, drinking fine wines and reading poetry aloud. Don't think about it. Just ring the doorbell again.

  I wonder if Patrick has deliberately given me the wrong address, and am about to head off when I hear him trot down the stairs.

  “Hi!” I say, smiling brightly as he opens the door.

  “Hello, Brian,” he groans, addressing that point to the right of my head, which he seems to prefer, and I follow him up the communal staircase to his flat.

  “So is everyone coming tonight?” I ask, innocently.

  “I think so.”

  “You've spoken to them all?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So you've spoken to Alice?”

  He stops on the stairs, turns and looks back. “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Don't worry. Alice is coming.” He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you? Does he worry that people will actually think he's just pretending?

  We enter the flat, which is small and plain, and reminiscent of an Eastern-bloc show home. It smells of warm mince and onions.

  “I've bought some wine!” I say.

  “I don't drink,” he says.

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I suppose you'll want a corkscrew. I think I've got one somewhere. D'you want tea, or do you want to start straight on in with your alcohol?”

  “Oh, booze, please!”

  “Right, well if you just go through there, I'll be with you in a minute. You don't smoke do you?”

  “No.”

  “Because it's strictly no-smoking …”

  “Okay, but I don't smoke …”

  “Right, well, it's just through there. Don't touch anything!” Because he's a third year, and because he's obviously got parents with money, Patrick seems to have got his life in some kind of semiadult order: proper, noninstitutional furniture, which he probably owns, a television, a video, a living room which doesn't have a bed or a gas cooker or a shower in it. In fact, he's barely a student at all; everything in its place and a place for everything, like the living quarters of a monk, or a particularly fastidious serial killer. While he's searching for the corkscrew, I look around the living room. On the wall above his desk is the flat's only decoration: a poster of a beach, with a set of footprints disappearing into the sunset, and that inspirational poem about how Jesus is beside you always. Though it would be fair to point out that if Jesus had been beside him in the TV studio last year, then he might have got more than 65 points.

  There's a ring on the doorbell, and I hear Patrick lollop downstairs, so I take the opportunity to examine his shelves—economic textbooks mainly, neatly alphabetized; a Good News Bible. Another shelf of videos—

  Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Blues Brothers—reveals the lighter side of Patrick Watts.

  But beside them are a series of about twenty identical VHS cassettes; a shelf of home-recorded videos with immaculately hand-typed white labels placed precisely along the spines. I step up to get a closer look and let out an involuntary gasp. The labels read:

  03/03/1984—Newcastle versus Sussex

  10/03/1984—Durham versus Leicester

  17/03/1984—King's, Cambridge, versus Dundee

  23/03/1984—Sidney Sussex versus Exeter

  30/03/1984—UMIST versus Liverpool

  06/04/1984—Birmingham versus UCL

  … And so it goes on, Keele versus Sussex, Manchester versus Sheffield, Open versus Edinburgh. On top of the cassettes is a picture in a frame, lying facedown. I'm feeling fairly Marion Crane now, but I pick it up and look at it, and, yes, it is indeed a photograph of Patrick shaking hands with Bamber Gascoigne and I realize with a sudden spasm of horror that this is Patrick's shrine, and that I have stumbled blindly into the lair of a madman.…

  “Looking for something, Brian?”

  I spin around, and look for a weapon. Patrick is standing in the doorway, with Lucy Chang peeking over his shoulder, and Lucy Chang's panda rucksack peeking over her shoulder.

  “Just admiring your photo!”

  “Fine, but could you put it back exactly where it came from?”

  “Yes, yes of course …”

  “Lucy—tea?”

  “Yes, yes thank you.”

  He shoots me a hands-off look, and heads back to the kitchen. Lucy sits on the hard-backed chair at Patrick's desk, but right on the edge, so as not to squash her panda. We sit in silence, and smile at each other, and for no apparent reason, she lets out a nervous little tinkling laugh. She's small and neat, wearing a very clean and neatly ironed white shirt with the top button done up. Not that this is at all important, but she's quite attractive too, even with the disconcertingly low hairline that seems to be creeping down her forehead to meet up with her eyebrows, like a wig that's slipped forward.

  I try and think of things to say. I contemplate telling her that according to the Guinness Book of Records, Chang is officially the commonest surname in the world, but I assume she already knows that, so instead say, “Hey, well done on that amazing score! Eighty-nine points!”

  “Oh, thank you. And well done to you, well done for …”

  “… Losing?”

  “Well … yes, I suppose so!” and she laughs again, high and brittle.

  “Well done for losing!”

  Out of politeness, I laugh too, and say, “Still, never mind. Fail again, fail better!”

  “Samuel Beckett, right?”

  “That's right,” I say, taken aback. “What are you studying, again?”

  “Oh, second-year medicine,” she says, and I think, my God, medicine, she's a genius. I watch in frank awe as she struggles out of her novelty rucksack.

  “I like the panda,” I say.

  “Oh—thank you!”

  “Peeking over your shoulder! Or should I say Beijing over your shoulder!”

  She looks at me uncomprehendingly, so by way of clarification, I s
ay, “Did you bring it with you from home?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Did you bring it from home?”

  She looks puzzled. “You mean my halls of residence?”

  I have the sensation of falling. “No, your, you know … your original home.”

  “Oh, you mean China! Because it's a panda, right? Well, actually, I'm from Minneapolis, so no.”

  “Yes, but originally you're from … ?”

  “Minneapolis …”

  “But your parents, they're from …”

  “Minneapolis …”

  “But their parents are from …”

  “Minneapolis …”

  “Of course. Minneapolis,” and she smiles at me with perfect, sincere kindness, despite the fact that I'm clearly ignorant, racist scum. “Where Prince comes from!” I add, funkily.

  “Exactly! Where Prince comes from,” she says. “Though I've never met the guy.”

  “Oh,” I say. I try again. “Have you seen Purple Rain?”

  “No,” she replies. “Have. You. Seen. Purple Rain?”

  “Yes. Twice,” I reply.

  “Did you enjoy it?” she asks.

  “Not really,” I reply.

  “And yet you saw it twice!”

  “I know,” I say, and add humorously, in a pretty good American accent, “Go figure!”

  And then, thank God, the door opens and it's Big Colin Pagett, carrying four bottles of Brown Ale and a cardboard bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Patrick shows him in like a head butler showing in the chimney sweep, and in the awkward silence that follows, I take time to ruminate on the complex art of conversation. Ideally, of course, I'd like to wake up in the morning and be handed a transcript of everything I'm about to say during the day, so that I could go through it and rewrite my dialogue, cutting the fatuous remarks and the crass, idiotic jokes. But clearly that's not practical, and the other option, of never speaking again, isn't going to work either.